basil – Sheetar.com

One Local Summer 2016 – Week 10

By Sheetar 26 July 2016 25 July 2016

Still playing catch-up, but here’s One Local Summer week 10! I had originally looked up recipes for Polenta Pizza, and came up with a recipe that had that name, but it much more resembles cornbread pizza than polenta pizza. I figure once you add anything other than water and butter/oil to cornmeal, especially when the extra ingredients are flour and baking powder, it ends up being cornbread and not polenta. Still, for cornbread pizza done in the cast iron skillet, this was pretty decent! I think the blue cheese and chorizo actually worked out well with the cornbread base so it wasn’t a traditional pizza on top of cornbread. The quick jolt near the end of cooking under the broiler was really key to really bubble the cheese on top, and the crust ended up with a nice, crunchy bottom (not burnt, just nicely well-baked). The leftovers are even good!

The recipe came from here (http://www.simplehealthykitchen.com/skillet-margarita-polenta-pizza/) and let’s forgive them for the misspelling of Margherita because even though the recipe was a little misleading, it was still good and cooked up as specified!

Ingredients:
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Cornmeal – Mill at Anselma
Smoked Chorizo – Countrytime Farm
Tomatoes – Jack’s Farm
Basil – My Garden
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Egg – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Non Local – Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper, Baking Powder

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 20

By Sheetar 8 October 2015 1 October 2015

Winding down to the end of One Local Summer with just a few weeks left of our set. Usually we drag this out through November, but we’re taking a break and wrapping it up soon. At the top of the meal, we have a bowl filled with all sorts of tomatoes, drizzled with some balsamic vinegar and topped with basil. Next around is a mug of homebrewed beer. The on the main plate is zucchini, sweet potatoes, lamb sausage, and banana peppers stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bison bacon. This meal involved a good bit of prep work, but once everything was cut and wrapped and ready, it all went onto the grill (except the tomatoes). Pretty easy! The lamb sausage was absolutely delicious and I’m glad I sprung for it at the market. The whole thing together made for a great dinner.

Ingredients:
Tomatoes – My Garden, Full Circle CSA
Basil – My Garden
Zucchini – Full Circle CSA
Sweet Potatoes – Jack’s Farm
Lamb Sausage – Canter Hill Farm
Banana Peppers – Steer Vegetables
Bison Bacon – Backyard Bison
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Blue Cheese
Non Local – Balsamic Vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2015 – Week 10b

By Sheetar 9 July 2015 9 July 2015

Still another catchup post, but I think as of next week I’ll be back on track. This week, even though the husband was home, I contributed a good bit! We have a basil plant that’s gone wild and before it bolted, I thought I’d gather up the basil and put it to good use as basil pasta and pesto. I blenderized the basil with some whey leftover from a batch of cheese the husband made earlier that week, olive oil, and a small amount of non-local pine nuts, then combined that mixture with flour to make the pasta (1 cup flour to 1/4 cup liquid). The meatballs were part veal, part pork with onions, chives, basil, and some salt and pepper, baked in the oven. Then grilled zucchini and a cucumber salad finish the meal along with a glass of mead (technically a pyment) from the Sap House Meadery in New Hampshire. Okay, that’s not entirely local, but it did follow us home from vacation and didn’t take a special trip to get here, so I’ll allow it!

For something special this dinner, we made dessert with leftover milk from the waffles last meal, honey, and raspberries from the bush in the yard. Paired it with a raspberry mead from Moonlight Meadery (another followed-us-home mead from New Hampshire). It was the perfect end to a lovely evening!

Ingredients:
Zucchini – Clover Hill Farm
Basil – My Garden
Cheese – Birchrun Hills, Equinox
Ground Veal – Birchrun Hills
Ground Pork – Countrytime Farm
Cucumbers – Clover Hill Farm
Onion – Clover Hill Farm
Flour – Whole Wheat Pastry Flour, Mill at Anselma
Milk Camphill Kimberton
Honey Baues’ Busy Bees
Raspberries – Our Yard
Raspberry Mead – Moonlight Meadery
Pyment – Sap House Meadery
Non Local – Pine nuts, salt, pepper, olive oil, homemade vinegar

One Local Summer

One Local Summer 2014 – Meal 5

By Sheetar 7 August 2014 4 August 2014

Another meal down, and just 9 left to my goal of 14 which we should be able to meet or exceed! We had a nice party over the weekend and have had a bit of fabulous weather (lows aorund 60 degrees F in July!), so we took advantage of the cool evenings for some outdoor dining. In the small bowl at top left is a tomato salad with some fresh basil, olive oil, and homemade vinegar. The main part of the dinner was a Bison sirloin topped with blue cheese – sooo good. Next, going around clockwise, are blue potatoes from our garden that were boiled, smooshed, and then put in a pan to roast after being doused with malt vinegar and sprinkled with salt. The idea for those came from Cook’s Country, but they didn’t quite smoosh down the way they were shown in the recipe. Blue potatoes seem to be starchier, and we boiled instead of baking them (short on time), so that might have been the difference. They still tasted excellent and really soaked up the vinegar. It was almost like having malt vinegar on french fries without the frying. Next around the plate are Corn Jalapeno Fritters from this month’s Bon Appetit. Couple of changes to locafy it involved using pickled banana peppers I had on hand already from a prior year’s bumper crop of peppers, and we used grilled corn leftover from our party over the weekend. The flour came from our local historic grist mill, and we had to add a little more flour and an extra egg since ours weren’t traditional grocery store ‘large’ eggs, but smaller farm-fresh happy-chicken eggs. They were SO good and so easy to make that we’re already thinking of other veggies to add in on the next go around since we still have leftover corn to burn through. And that’s that! I’m a few weeks late posting this one, but I kind of wanted to space out the One Local Summer posts on the blog instead of flooding them out as they’re cooked.

Ingredients:
Tomatoes – Hoagland Farms
Basil – Our Garden
Bison Sirloin – Backyard Bison
Blue Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Potatoes – Our Garden
Corn – Hoagland Farms
Flour – Mill at Anselma
Eggs – Deep Roots Valley Farm
Equinox Cheese – Birchrun Hills
Hot Peppers – Our Garden
Non Local – Beer, salt, pepper, olive oil, malt vinegar

One Local Summer, recipes

One Local Summer – Week 22

By Sheetar 11 October 2010 7 February 2012

The husband decided that we ought to use up some ground bison and make his own special on-the-fly version of Italian Wedding Soup. This was a collaborative effort, and what we came up with is absolutely incredible. It’s far from traditional, but it was incredibly delicious and definitely something that will be made again. We had made chicken wings the night prior (boil wings, then throw on grill to crisp) so we had the chicken stock on hand already. Other than that, the recipe is below, feel free to print, use, and enjoy!

Italian Wedding Soup:
Bison – Backyard Bison
Red Onions – Maysie’s Farm
Garlic – Maysie’s Farm
Egg – Mt View Organics
Bread – LeBoon’s Homemade
Cilantro, Sage, Basil – My Garden
Carrots – Maysie’s Farm
Potatoes – Smith’s Produce
Chicken Broth – Boiled down from Mt View Organics wings (Tuesday Night’s dinner!)
Non-Local – Salt

Italian Wedding Soup	Print

Ingredients – Meatballs	Ingredients – Soup
1 lb ground bison	10 cups Chicken Broth (from 2lbs chicken, boiled)
2 cloves garlic, minced	2 Small Red Onions, Diced
1 egg	2 Carrots, sliced
1 slice Italian Bread, crumbled	8 Small Potatoes, cubed
Cilantro, Sage, Basil to taste	1 tsp Salt
	12 large leaves of Spinach, chopped

Instructions:
Preheat oven to 350F. Break egg into bowl, add bison, garlic, crumbled bread, and spices, mix together well with hands. Roll into 1″ round meatballs, place on greased cookie tray and bake in oven for 20 minutes. Heat broth on medium-high in large stock pot. add onions, carrots, potatoes, and salt and simmer while meatballs are cooking. Add meatballs to pot and simmer for 15 minutes. Add spinach and simmer until wilted. Top with your favorite grated cheese and enjoy! Makes approximately 14 1-cup servings

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 21

By Sheetar 6 October 2010 6 October 2010

The husband has returned home and planted himself in the kitchen. I can’t say I mind, when the result is an amazing crock pot meal. He took a Bison chuck roast out of the freezer and threw in all manner of vegetables and fruit that I had from the farmer’s markets and came up with something AMAZING. The bison was SO tender after cooking for five hours and the way the flavors blended together was really a work of art. I think I’m still in a food coma over this one! It was all served over some home made noodles using Whole Wheat Pastry flour and Buckwheat flour from the Mill at Anselma.

Crock Pot Bison Roast:
Bison Chuck Roast – Backyard Bison
Onion – North Star Orchard
Purple Potatoes – Unknown Vendor at Anselma
Apples – North Star Orchard
Noodles – Egg from Mt View Organics, Flour from the Mill at Anselma, Buckwheat flour from the Mill at Anselma
Peppers – My Garden
Wine – Paradocx
Beer – Homebrew Imperial Blonde
Sage – My Garden
Cilantro – My Garden
Basil – My Garden
Non-Local – Spices

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 17

By Sheetar 8 September 2010 6 September 2010

Sister-in-law Brenda was in town this week and was flipping through the Cook’s Country compilation book for 2008. The husband had bought the book on super-sale at Amazon.com and we haven’t really made any of the recipes so far. So, when Brenda stumbled upon a recipe for Thin-Crust Skillet Pizza (August/September 2008, pg 18), I was more than happy to pull out the cast iron skillet and get cooking! The recipe calls for beer as the liquid in the dough, and we happened to have a homebrewed Hefeweizen on tap in the kegerator. It proved to be a good choice! The dough came out nice and crispy, and we had plenty of vegetables available for the topping. For me, this was easier and quicker than heating up the pizza stone, we didn’t have to wait for the dough to rise (no yeast – just beer and baking powder), and it was a delicious lunch to enjoy out on the patio.

Thin-Crust Skillet Pizza:
Whole Wheat Pastry Flour – Mill at Anselma
Bread Flour – Mill at Anselma
Zucchini – Smith’s Produce
Mushrooms – Oley Valley Mushrooms. Crimini
Tomatoes – My Garden. These are Super Italian Paste Tomatoes
Cheese – Birchrun Hills Farm. Clipper variety.
Sharp I Chevre – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Basil – My Garden
Onion – North Star Orchard
Non-local – Baking powder, sugar, salt, beer, olive oil

One Local Summer

One Local Summer – Week 14

By Sheetar 16 August 2010 14 August 2010

My little garden in the backyard has finally started producing something! After a REALLY disappointing zucchini season – read: Lack Thereof – the garden has made up for things by giving me a ton of cucumbers. I planted lemon cucumbers, regular old green cucumbers, and miniature white cucumbers. I’ve foisted some off on the neighbors, and have been eating a lot of them fresh out of the garden, but there are still too many. So, I found a wonderful recipe for cucumber soup. I doubled the recipe, using three green cukes, two lemon cukes, and two of the over-ripe white cukes that turned bright yellow. Used cilantro, oregano, basil, and sage from the deck herb planters, plain old water instead of broth, and left out the avocado. My soup isn’t bright green like the picture in the recipe, but I let the onion get a good carmelization going which contributed to the brownish tinge to the soup. It’s great both hot and cold, with or without the dollop of yogurt.

Cucumber Soup:
Cucumbers – My Garden
Herbs – My Garden
Goat’s Milk Yogurt – Shellbark Hollow Farm
Garlic – North Star Orchard
Non-local – pepper, olive oil, lime juice, salt, cayenne pepper